Teresa Carpenter - Without a Doubt

Even though the warrantless entry seemed, under the circumstances, justified, the omission of it on the affidavit could serve to seriously undermine his credibility.

Both Curt and I knew that come the preliminary hearing, we would end up doing battle to justify the cops’ entry and defend their integrity. For now, I was content to see that the second warrant was done right. I wanted a thorough search for the items we now knew Simpson had on the night of the murders. Principally, we were looking for the knife from Ross Cutlery and the dark sweats Kato had seen Simpson wearing during the early evening, neither of which had turned up. I also wanted to search the Bentley. If we found no blood there, it would indicate that Simpson had not wounded his finger until after the outing to McDonald’s; that, in turn, would place the cut closer to the time of the murders.

The five of us-Tom, Phil, David, Bill, and I-arrived in a single car at Rockingham on the morning of Tuesday, June 28. Reporters blocked the gates. Overhead, I could hear the thrum of copters. The scene looked like something out of Apocalypse Now .

“Did you guys request those?” I asked Tom.

“It’s the media,” he replied, disgusted.

We parked on Rockingham and were ushered in by a couple of uniforms. I met up with John Stevens, a photographer for the D.A.‘s office, whom I’d asked to come on this search to videotape the grounds. I wanted him to record Allan Park’s view of the driveway and front door from his position facing the Ashford gate. This would allow me to demonstrate to a jury how Park’s vantage point allowed him to see Simpson entering the house. I also showed John a couple of other areas we should document-for instance, the south pathway where the glove had been found. If a case takes months to come to trial, you can forget little details of layout. You find yourself clinging to frames of videotape. It’s essential to capture those images right away.

As Tom and I walked through the kitchen I noticed a pretty young black woman standing in a small desk-and-bookcase nook. She looked uncomfortable. I hadn’t expected any civilians, so at first I assumed she was a cop.

“Marcia,” Tom said, “this is Arnelle Simpson. Arnelle, Marcia Clark is the D.A. on the case.”

Arnelle had no reason to like me. I’m sure she saw me as just one more intruder tramping through her home. I didn’t know what to say except “I’m sorry for all this. We’ll get out of your way as soon as possible.” She said nothing-just smiled weakly and shook my hand.

When Tom and I got to the pool area, we found Phil and Mark Fuhrman standing near a round glass table. I thought we might be able to grab a few minutes to talk. Sometime before the hearings we would all have to sort out the events of the detectives’ first trip out to Rockingham on the morning of June 13. I would need a solid, lucid accounting, not only of their actions, but of their frame of mind, in order to defend that search.

But as we spoke, the din of the news copters grew so loud that we were having to shout in one another’s ears. We stopped that when someone warned us that the media might have parabolic mikes pointed in our direction. “Let’s try writing notes to each other,” I shouted at Mark, and he nodded back, pulling out his pad. But before he’d managed to set anything on paper, one of the detectives motioned to us that some eye in the sky might be able to read them. I gave up. We agreed to meet later in my office to finish the interview.

We retreated inside, where I happened to glance at a television mounted on the wall in Simpson’s living room. The day’s news fare was… us. Local programming had been canceled in order to bring the viewers of Los Angeles a live, on-the-spot broadcast of the scene at Rockingham. The image on the screen was the exterior of the house. And I was inside the house, watching them watching us. Could this get any weirder?

I went through that house room by room to see how the search was going. Simpson’s bedroom was thoroughly tossed, but the day’s results were to be measured mainly in the negative: No knife; no bloody sweat clothes. Nor were there bloodstains in the Bentley.

We did, however, seize some additional pieces of evidence, among them a single leather glove, this one black, which I’d seen lying on a table in the living room during the first search. It had a different lining from the pair found at Bundy and in the south walkway, but both the single glove and the bloody pair in evidence had been manufactured by Aris. I thought this would tend to suggest that Simpson favored the brand.

When I reached the foyer, a cop called out to me, “I found his divorce file.” He handed me a letter typed on the letterhead of “O. J. Simpson Enterprises.” It was from Simpson to Nicole and was dated June 6, 1994. It put her on written notice that she did not have permission or authority to use his permanent home address at 360 North Rockingham as her residence or mailing address for any purpose, including tax returns. “I cannot take part in any course of action by you that might intentionally or unintentionally be misleading to the Internal Revenue or California Franchise Tax Board,” he wrote. It was signed “O.J.” and cc’ed to his attorney, LeRoy Taft.

Until now Simpson had been claiming that at the time of Nicole’s murder, his relationship with her had been amicable. But in this typed sheet I was holding, he was ordering her in icy legalese to steer clear of Rockingham. This pair had been divorced for two years, and they were still arguing over assets. When I saw the letters “IRS,” I knew we had our flashpoint.

I took the letter outside to show David. His eyes widened as he read it.

“See the date?” I asked him.

“Incredible,” he agreed. But neither of us knew exactly how to proceed.

After a moment of silence, David looked at me. I could tell what he was thinking. This piece of evidence lay in a gray area. The letter was clearly not specified in the warrant. There had been no way we could have been aware of its existence. And yet we were standing with a piece of evidence that went clearly to the defendant’s state of mind during the days before the murders.

“I think the law is on our side,” David said finally. “I think we can take it.”

So we did.

Months later, at trial, the trial judge would thwart our first attempts to present the IRS letter as evidence. Because it was not mentioned in the affidavit to the search warrant, he ruled, it was inadmissible. He was right, or course. But by then I’d figured out a lawful way to procure that document. I promptly sent Attorney Taft a subpoena for the letter.

I was not losing that letter. No way. No how.

I set about our preparations for the prelims with my usual anal-retentive devotion, but it was like trying to neatly crayon in one of my sons’ coloring books while riding in a bumper car. I’d just get up to speed, and I’d be knocked outside the lines.

Case in point: it took a lot of phone calls and a lot of politicking before I finally persuaded SID to assign Greg Matheson to do the initial blood analysis to determine whether the blood might be Simpson’s. Conventional tests will usually narrow the number of possible donors to only 10 to 15 percent of the population. In a city like Los Angeles, with nearly three and a half million people, that’s still a whopping 450,000 candidates.

But we caught a real break. The blood type that came up on the drop at Bundy was fairly rare: it could have come from only one half of one percent of the population. Only one person in 200 had that blood type. And Orenthal James Simpson was one of them. Yes!

I carried my good news down to a meeting with Bill and some of the brass. But before I could utter a word, I was stopped dead in my tracks by their somber faces.